"Calderwood, forsooth! There never cam’ faith or truth frae one o’ the line o’ Piteadie since the cardinal was stickit by Norman Leslie, a hundred years ago. Are ye a daughter o’ mine and o’ Symon Moultray, and yet are hen-hearted enough to renounce God and his covenanted kirk, and adhere to bishops and curates?—to seek the fushionless milk that cometh frae a yeld bosom, sic as the kirk o’ prelacy hath? Fie! and awa’ wi’ ye!" "I forsake nae kirk, mother," urged the poor lassie; "but I will adhere to my Willie. Falsehood never came o’ his line, and the Calderwoods are auld as the three trees o’ Dysart." "And shall be shunned like the de’il o’ Dysart," replied her mother, beating the hearthstone with the high heel of her red shoe. The cornfields were yellowing in the fertile Howe of Fife, and the woods were still green in all their summer beauty, when, about Old Lammas-day, in the year 1645, there went a vague whisper through the land—none knew how—that a bloody battle had been fought somewhere about the Fells of Campsie; that many a helmet had been cloven, many a blue-bonneted head lay on the purple heather; and that many a Whig Fife laird had perished with his followers. Sorely troubled in spirit, the Reverend Elijah Howler took his ivory-handled staff, adjusted his bands and his beaver above his calotte cap, and, in quest of sure tidings, set forth to Kinghorn, at the market-cross of which he had heard the terrible intelligence, that the sword of the ungodly had triumphed—that Montrose had burst into the lowlands like a roaring lion, seeking whom he might devour; and all along the Burntisland Road Elijah saw the Fife troopers come spurring, with buff-coats slashed, and harness battered, bloody, dusty, and having all the signs of discomfiture and fear. Ere long he learned that Symon of Seafield and his three sons were in safety (thanks to their horses’ heels); but that the Marquis of Montrose had encountered the army of the covenant on the field of Kilsythe, where he had gained a great and terrible victory, slaying, by the edge of the sword, six thousand soldiers; that the killing covered fourteen miles Scottish—_i.e._, twenty-five miles English—and that on the men of the Fifeshire regiments had fallen the most serious slaughter. In fact, very few of them ever returned, for nearly all perished, and the terror of that day is still a tradition in many a hamlet of Fife. Annora felt joy in her heart when her father and brothers returned; yet it was not without alloy, for where was he whom she had sworn to love, and a lock of whose dark brown hair she wore in secret next her heart? Lying cold and mangled, perhaps, on the field of Kilsythe! There one of her father’s men, Roger of Tyrie, had found a relic of terrible import. It was a kilmaur’s whittle; the blade was of fine steel, hafted with tortoiseshell, adorned with silver circlets. It was graven with the Calderwood arms, and spotted with blood; but whose blood?